A agree that Ruby on Rails is jusrt one of many options. But I must a couple of corrections to your statements.

First, Ruby has an analog of Perl's DBI called Ruby::DBI. Rails' ORM is build on top of Ruby::DBI and operates at a much higher level of abstraction. Class::DBI is in no way a match for Rails' ActiveRecord.

Second, unless you need two-phase commits or distributed transactions, its Java that is not competitive with Ruby on Rails (unless you are competing for which needs to hire the largest number of developers).